After sickening US Navy sailors in 2011, radioactive steam continues to billow from Fukushima reactor
by: Jonathan Benson
Thursday, January 09, 2014
It was recently unveiled that U.S. Navy sailors aboard the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan during the time of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster suffered severe radiation poisoning after being left out to sea for months without aid. And new reports indicate that the cause of this nightmarish situation for these unfortunate sailors — radioactive steam from the melted reactor cores at Fukushima — is still billowing from the stricken plant some three years later.
Navy sailor Lindsay Cooper, 24, recently shared the horrific events of that time with the New York Post (NYPost), which just before Christmas broke the story publicly. It was a brisk day in March, just days after Fukushima was stricken by a tsunami that resulted in three of its six reactor cores literally melting into the earth, when Cooper and her colleagues got their first taste of what happens as a result of radiation exposure.
“I was standing on the flight deck, and we felt this warm gust of air, and, suddenly, it was snowing,” recalled Cooper to the NYPost, explaining how at the time nobody knew what to make of the situation. “We joked about it: ‘Hey, it’s radioactive snow!’ I took pictures and video.”
But the jokes quickly stopped after Navy crew members quickly began to fall ill. As it turns out, the ship had been drifting in radioactive water for several days prior to being engulfed in what would later be identified as a cloud of radioactive steam from Fukushima. According to reports, the ship’s desalinization system had been quietly dispensing radioactive water through the faucets and showers, exposing everyone on board to what would soon become a type of hell on Earth.